Introducing Ubeswap
Celo is the ideal blockchain for modern decentralized financeーmobile-first, quick to reconcile transactions, with gas fees less than a tenth of a cent. Additionally, as a fully EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible blockchain, Celo is one of the easiest blockchains for Solidity developers to build on.
DeFi on Celo is still in its infancy. Because there is no unified exchange for Celo assets, it’s near impossible for new tokens to get liquidity. Furthermore, there are few investment opportunities on Celo, which provides little incentive to keep assets on-chain. To fulfill Celo’s mission of building a better, more equitable financial system, there needs to be a strong liquidity foundation to support its growing DeFi ecosystem.
Introducing Ubeswap: the liquidity foundation for Celo
Ubeswap is a decentralized exchange and automated market maker protocol for Celo assets. At its core, Ubeswap enables Celo users and applications to trade between any two ERC20 tokens.
To enhance the user experience of trading on Celo, we built a mobile-first interface for Ubeswap. Despite mobile increasingly becoming the primary way people manage their finances, there are few mobile-friendly gateways to interact with DeFi.
However, mobile-first does not mean mobile only. Ubeswap directly supports the Ledger hardware wallet, and integration with a Celo Chrome extension wallet will exist before mainnet launch.
Protocol Design
Ubeswap’s protocol design is based off Uniswap’s core contracts. This means that any DeFi application built using Uniswap can easily integrate with Ubeswap.
Token Distribution
LPs will earn additional rewards in the form of $UBE governance tokens. Early adopters are essential in ensuring that the project continues to support the Celo community. Therefore, users who trade or provide liquidity on Ubeswap during its first few weeks on mainnet will become significant stakeholders in the protocol.
More will come soon on the specifics of token distribution.
Fee Structure
In exchange for providing liquidity to a pool of two Celo assets, liquidity providers (LPs) earn 0.30% of the pool’s trading fees.
In the future, part of this fee will go towards $UBE token holders. More details on this staking mechanism will be coming soon.
The Ubeswap Community Development Fund
We’ve designed Ubeswap as a community-oriented protocol aimed at accelerating the creation and usage of DeFi on Celo. As part of this mission, a large portion of the initial token supply will be allocated towards a fund supporting members building on Celo. Proposals will be reviewed by a council of DeFi contributors across the Celo community.
If you are building a DeFi application on Celo or another EVM chain, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at partnerships@ubeswap.org if you’re interested!
Smart Contracts
The contracts are available on GitHub.
A frequently updated list of contract addresses is available here: https://docs.ubeswap.org/code-contracts
Get Involved
You can start trading and supplying liquidity on our testnet using the Ubeswap mobile interface at app-alfajores.ubeswap.org.
We’re targeting a mainnet launch date of March 1. Stay tuned for updates!
